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I just received this firsthand report of the third day of Minuteman Project activities. It was sent by JackelopeBreeder and it references idratherbepainting (some of you may remember them). I arranged their meeting with Pauline Lubens, a reporter from the San Jose Mercury News which is also referenced in this report.

Buenos nachos, muchachos.
Today was a busy day for the Minuteman Project. Patrols don’t officially start until tomorrow, but yesterday and today were both spent getting teams oriented and trained up on the tricks of the trails – the Ilegal Alien Trails, that is.
(As I type this, just over a hundred MMP members are sitting quietly in the night watching those trails.)
The morning began with the standard briefing and assigning new arrivals to teams. This went smoothly and teams were deployed across the length of the border and in other areas of interest. Unfortunately, a good bit of my anonymity went down the tubes as Fox News, Univision, and Telemundo had video crews present and I was introduced by name as being in charge of the teams in the canyons.
The media went out with us again. I hope everyone gets to see one set of video taken by Fox News. A team of Minutemen from Grand Junction, Colorado had found the absolute mother of all lay-up areas along a ridgeline in Coronado National Forest. The cute young Fox News babe went dancing up that ridgeline like a mountain goat. Imagine a field of discarded trash, clothing, backpacks, and assorted waste a half mile in length. Several areas had been improved into semi-permanent status with tarps and tentage. Fox got the entire area on tape. I really hope this one shows up on TV.
Shortly afterwards, we engaged in a practice exercise with the Minuteman Air Force, getting both ground and air personnel familiar with comms and procedures. It took a remarkably short time for all to learn exactly how to put the aircraft exactly over a point of interest.
Illegal alien traffic remained extremely low today. We only caught five in the western sector and it took luck, time and a little detective work. Fellow LePer idratherbepainting had gone out to the highway to meet a photo-journalist from the San Jose Mercury News, but when she got to the meeting point the first thing she say was a glove penned to the barbed wire next to where she parked – current coyote signal that this is a pick-up point for illegals.
She called me down from the canyons and as I drove up I spotted a strange scene: a nice neat line of crisply folded McDonalds bags (food for five) and a plastic bag full of gallon water jugs, all in plain sight on the shoulder of the highway. Dumbness on the part of the delivery boy, exacerbated by the fact that he left all the receipts. The water had been purchased 30 minutes earlier and the food 20 minutes before I found it, from stores 6 miles north of the location.
There being no sign of the rightful owners, we photographed it in place, then placed the potential litter in the back of my truck as a late lunch for idratherbepainting’s dogs. I kept the water. Another MMP team was moved into the area while she and I and the photo-journalist started a wider search. We found further widespread cast-off items, but our five tourists without visas were running late and didn’t show up for another two hours. The actual spotting by MMP and the Border Patrol apprehension was exhaustively captured on film by a photographer from the New York Times.
Oddly, perhaps, most of the media has been friendly and most articles have been fairly favorable so far. I guess it’s because they get the same rude welcome to the realities of the border that the out of town Minutemen receive. I get the same question over and over from both groups: “How do you live with this situation day after day?”
I have to admit that I do not have any good answer to that question.